Strategy Safari

My good friend Frank Buytendijk turned me on to an excellent (comprehensive) book on the history and evolution of strategic management called “Strategy Safari: A Guided Tour Through The Wilds of Strategic Management” by Mintzberg et al.

There is a broad range of topics in this book including leadership, business processes, planning, analytics, learning organizations and other areas that we get involved with in the Business Foundation.

The book divides strategy into 10 ‘schools’ of thought:

1. The Design School(…a Process of Conception)
2. The Planning School (…a Formal Process)
3. The Positioning School (…an Analytical Process)
4. The Entrepreneurial School (…a Visionary Process)
5. The Cognitive School (…a Mental Process)
6. The Learning School(…an Emergent Process)
7. The Power School(…a Process of Negotiation)
8. The Cultural School (…a Collective Process)
9. The Environmental School (…a Reactive Process)
10. The Configuration School(a Process of Transformation)

It includes a good summary of Michael Porter (I’m 2 degrees separated: he was my friend Catherine’s professor) – I’m on my second reading of Porter’s Competitive Strategy, and Competitive Advantage is not far behind. I got to hear him lecture in ’05 at the Los Angeles World Business Forum and a few of the key things I took away include:

- most companies don’t have a strategy

- operational efficiency is *not* a strategy

- how you think about competition drives how you think about strategy

- there is more than one way to compete (there are lots of customers and many needs), so compete to be unique; to deliver some distinctive value (not just be ‘the best’ or ‘the first’)

- all strategy translates into a higher price (through differentiation) or a lower cost…or both. What balance are you seeking to achieve?

- Strategy has to be connected directly to the income statement and the balance sheet (and cash flow statement).

I’m interested to find out if you ‘belong’ to one (or more) of the 10 schools of strategy!